Digital wound care startup Swift Medical is making moves to corner a bigger share of the home health market.
The company is partnering with one of the largest home health providers, AccentCare, to get its technology into the hands of thousands of care providers.
Post-acute healthcare company AccentCare serves more than 210,000 individuals across 31 states and plan to use Swift Medical’s digital wound management platform to improve care for the highest complexity wound patients in the home.
Swift Medical's technology is able to capture wound care information by waving the smartphone above the injured site in a “wand-like fashion.” It is also able to determine the depth of the injury. The technology captures wound images and measurements without the doctor or nurse having to touch the wound. And Swift Medical digitizes, tracks and automates the wound care management workflow.
The company's technology is used by over 3,900 healthcare organizations to improve the prevention, treatment and management of wounds, according to Swift Medical.
There are more people with a chronic wound than with breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer and leukemia combined, according to Swift Medical.
"We think it’s a special problem that needs to be solved," Perez said.
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A third of home health patients require wound care, but there aren’t enough wound care specialists to be in every patient’s home, Perez said.
“More and more patients want to receive care in their homes. Our solution enables large, enterprise agencies to provide standardized and scalable wound care for all their patients," said Carlo Perez, co-founder and CEO at Swift Medical, in a statement.
Home health agencies are struggling to provide standardized care across broad patient settings, Perez told Fierce Healthcare.
"How do you deliver standardized, high-quality wound care? How do you help nursing staff, with 30,000 staff in the field, do that job without feeling like you are giving them more work? Swift solves that problem for them. We give nurses something they have wanted for 30 years, something that helps them to do their jobs more easily," he said.
Traditionally, nurses and clinicians measure wounds with a paper measure, which contributes to high error rates. Swift Medical's technology measures wounds with 90% accuracy, the company said.
"This enables providers to make earlier decisions about whether the treatments are effective or not effective," Perez said.
Raised by a father who was a trained engineer and a mother who worked as a nurse, Perez is an engineer by background who worked on novel applications of state-of-the-art visioning technology before co-founding Swift Medical. Another co-founder, Justin Allport, is an aerospace engineer by training, and he worked for over a decade as part of the team responsible for developing path-tracking and vision algorithms for Mars Rover prototypes.
That imaging technology expertise was used to develop Swift Medical's platform that uses artificial intelligence to accurately measure wound circumference, type and progress. Swift’s AI analyzes the wound and provides wound specialists with a comprehensive view of the wound care population, according to the company.
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The Canadian startup, launched in 2015, has raised about $13 million in venture capital funding backed by Data Collective, Real Ventures and Relay Ventures.
At a time when greater numbers of higher acuity patients are being discharged into the home, Swift Medical’s mobile app helps front-line clinicians provide standardized, best-practice care with high-precision wound images while providing centralized wound experts with visibility into population-wide wound data.
The partnership with AccentCare follows on the heels of Swift Medical's collaboration with home health software company Homecare Homebase to develop an integrated wound care solution.
"AccentCare partnered with Swift to enhance the innovative offerings for patient care. The platform allows for very specific measurement and documentation of wound status which feeds directly back into the electronic medical record," Dave Davis, vice president of clinical solutions and integrity at AccentCare, told Fierce Healthcare.
"This enhances the ability to coordinate care, facilitate reviews by our internal wound specialists and share with the physician or practitioner. We strongly believe that this will lead to positive outcomes such as a faster time to wound closure and lessen the risk of wound deterioration leading to higher patient and clinician satisfaction," Davis said.
AccentCare employs more than 31,000 professionals in more than 260 locations, and the company operates under regional brand names including AccentCare, Alliance For Health, Gareda, Guardian, HRS, Seasons, Sta-Home, Southeastern Health Care at Home and Texas Home Health.